Gratitude has become a popular word in recent years. Not only is it popular in the spirituality/wellness/meditation circles, but the term has also found its place in the mainstream psyche. Why is gratitude important? There are many benefits. This article from PositivePsychology.com has a pretty good definition of gratitude and provides an in-depth look at gratitude through the lenses of science and psychology. In short, gratitude is a very good thing and it leads us to happiness.
Although gratitude is a nice concept and no one can really reject the good intention behind it, how do you actually practise gratitude? What does it mean to be grateful? And perhaps more importantly, how do you become grateful when you don’t actually feel it?
How Do You Be Grateful When You Don’t Feel Grateful?
The world can feel like a mad place sometimes and one doesn’t need to look very far to find reasons to get irritated, either by a situation or people around us. It’s all very well to talk about gratitude, but when the people you deal with seem ungrateful themselves, it becomes very difficult to remain grateful. Sometimes it feels like there isn’t much to be grateful about. So many things can go wrong. Our relationships, our financial situation and our health situation can all make it very challenging to maintain a sense of gratitude.
Awareness Is The First Step
Gratitude begins with noticing our world around us, our immediate surroundings. Being aware of our current environment is the first step. The clothes we wear, the house we live in, the food we have in the pantry, the fact we have access to clean water, the fact we are breathing right now are just a few examples. It can be as trivial as you like. In fact, the more trivial the example, the better it is. We should probably bear in mind that many people in the world right now don’t even have the most basic privileges mentioned. There are so many things to be grateful about. If we use a ‘magnifying glass’ to look at things, even the most trivial thing can seem enough to be grateful about. The fact that you are reading this post is already a privilege as people in some countries don’t even have access to the internet.
Last but not least, gratitude is also said to be on a higher vibrational frequency. This means that we generally function better in our lives, feel more alive, peaceful and joyful. Even good things may come into our lives either in physical forms or intangible forms. I will conclude the post by saying, ‘let’s make gratitude a daily practice and see what happens.’